Growth Hacking is the best way for startups and established companies to achieve rapid and sustainable growth through a data-driven, experiential marketing approach.
Grow your business like Facebook, LinkedIn or Airbnb did
Starting with companies that today have come to fundamentally change the way we live our lives, growth hacking is the best way to grow your business.
Instead of investing huge amounts of money in outdated marketing ideas and campaigns that you can’t measure, Growth Hacking offers a modern and creative approach based on measurement and testing. It proposes first making sure that what you offer is exactly what people need and then using your creativity to find the most effective ways to reach customers.
Growth hackers have left out the classic marketing textbook. They have an almost obsessive focus on growth. They are always asking the question “How can I attract more users or customers for this business?”. They avoid industry jargon and words like “mind share” or “branding” will never be important terms for a growth hacker.
While this approach has been used predominantly by tech startups, at unosoft we believe it can be implemented for any type of business. Our experience has proven that.
Why Growth Hacking Marketing?
Simply because what worked in the past no longer works today. Effective marketing channels and tactics are changing with dizzying speed. And perhaps the strongest argument for growth hacking is that a startup doesn’t have the resources of a large company to pour money into marketing.
That’s why we need to use our creativity and not our “muscle” to deliver results. And that’s where growth hacking comes in.
Growth Hacking Essentials
One of the major innovations of growth hacking as an approach to marketing is that it proposes using the product itself to attract new customers. Thus, it is no longer just something passive that is promoted, but part of the marketing strategy.
Growth, because otherwise…
The major difference between a growth hacker and a marketer, generally speaking, is the orientation, almost obsession, that they have towards growth. For them, branding, notoriety and other vague and hard-to-measure aspects are ok if they appear as side effects, but the goal will always be to attract new customers or increase the lifetime value of existing ones.
If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist
Although also relying on experience and intuition, a growth hacker has a rigour akin to that of a scientist conducting an experiment. He always makes sure he has the tools in place to measure the effectiveness of the ideas and tactics he tests.
Focus on the customer
A growth hacker knows that it’s always the customer and the numbers that are right. He will always try to validate his ideas by getting customer feedback. Especially at the start of a business, this part of getting feedback from customers is crucial!
Automate and scale
Because he’s always looking for new creative ways to grow the business, once a marketing idea is validated, a growth hacker will try to automate it as much as possible so he can focus on other ideas or needs of the company.
Use leverage thinking
Having a hacker mentality, marketers who adopt this concept are always trying to find easier ways to achieve their goals. Although they test many ideas and tactics, they will focus on the 20% that bring 80% of the results.
Growth Hacking Marketing Process
1. ACHIEVING PRODUCT MARKET FIT
A growth hacker doesn’t get to work until he’s sure that what he’s offering is what people want. He “presses the accelerator pedal” only when he is convinced that without the product/service he offers, current customers would be sad.
2. ANALYSES AND IMPLEMENTS MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS
When starting a new project, a growth hacker allocates time to analyze all the data the business has. He’ll conduct small surveys, questionnaires and tests to make sure he understands the product and customers down to the smallest details. The next step is to make sure they have the tools they need in place to measure the effectiveness of the ideas they test.
3. DEFINE ACTIONABLE GOALS AND COME UP WITH IDEAS
A growth hacker is as precise in what he does as a sniper. He always sets very specific goals before he gets to work. Whether it’s attracting new customers or increasing the lifetime value of existing ones, they make a list of all the ideas they think will help them.
4. PRIORITIZE IDEAS.
Depending on the potential an idea may have and the ease or difficulty with which it can be implemented, they prioritize the ideas from the previous step and start with those that can have the greatest impact on the business, in the shortest time, and are easiest to implement and measure.
5. IMPLEMENT AND TEST.
The stage in which he spends the most time, a growth hacker will experiment with as many ideas as possible to discover the ones that can have the greatest impact on business growth. The speed with which these are implemented and tested is crucial.
6. ANALYZE AND OPTIMIZE.
Once an experiment is completed, a growth hacker will draw the line and decide whether the idea tested was successful or not, based on initial expectations. He then decides whether to invest more resources in it, improve it and test it again, or abandon the idea.
7. REPEAT.
A growth hacker is always looking for new opportunities to grow the business. Once he has completed a test cycle, he will take the next idea on the list and implement it. A growth hacker knows that success doesn’t come from a single “magic idea”, but from a rigorous testing process.
Does it work?
We say it does.
Also dozens of other startups, mostly in Sillicon Valley, using this methodology to revolutionize industries. Here are just a few successful examples. We’ve tested this in Romania too and we can say it works. In fact, we are proud to be the first growth hacking marketing agency in Romania.
Hotmail
Instead of investing tens of millions of dollars in marketing, they used a creative approach where the product itself brought in more customers. Specifically, they introduced the message P.S. I love you. Get your free email at HoTMaiL at the end of every email you send. They ended up being acquired by Microsoft for $400 million.
Dropbox
They offered every user who recommended the product to a friend and they made an account, 500 MB of extra storage. And to encourage the other party to use the product and friends who signed up, they got 500 MB of extra storage.
At first, the big problem with Twitter was that people would sign up for the platform, but soon abandon it. Through testing and measurement, the folks at Twitter noticed that if the user followed 5-10 people from the start, they were much more likely to use the platform in the long run. And indeed, they did.
A little “trick” led to an increase from 2 million users to 200 million. Specifically, they gave users the ability to create a public profile that would show up in Google search results.
Tim Ferris
To sell the book the 4-Hour Chef (a rather massive 600-page book), he structured it into several self-contained parts and offered them for free on platforms like BitTorrent. Basically, you didn’t have to read the whole book to learn anything. This little growth hack led to the sale of over 250,000 copies.
Want to learn more about growth hacking?
We’ve written a complete guide, read by over 10,000 Romanians. You can access it for free.
